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More Kind Than Home, More Large Than Earth A sermon by the Rev. Judith Meyer Minister, the Unitarian Universalist Community Church, Santa Monica, CA Delivered at the UUA General Assembly June 22, 2001 |
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More Kind Than Home, More Large Than Earth A sermon by the Rev. Judith Meyer Minister, the Unitarian Universalist Community Church, Santa Monica, CA Delivered at the UUA General Assembly June 22, 2001 |
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Order of Service
Something has spoken to me in the night,
Burning the tapers of the waning year ...
When Thomas Wolfe wrote these words
he was still a young man.
And though he did not know it,
he would die before long, too.
An intuitive sense of his fate may have lent urgency to his work,
for You Can't Go Home Again
was nothing less than a voluminous outpouring
of commentary on the human condition.
The book was not published until after his death.
Wolfe had a sharp eye on reality;
his voyeuristic observations nailed
what is twisted,
hypocritical
and vain in human nature.
But he also expressed a belief
in another reality,
transcendent and true,
for which he held out hope
and a shred of innocent longing.
Try to imagine,
Wolfe suggested,
what would happen
if we were to let go of all that holds us
to places, people, life itself –
to lose everything,
and leave everyone –
try to imagine what would be left.
Perhaps Wolfe was simply telling us
that after we die,
we go to a place like that –
and it's a better place than earth,
and our better selves will feel at home at last.
Even so, it's not a conventional image of heaven,
because this one is connected to the earth.
It is a place
'Whereon the pillars of this earth are founded,
Toward which the conscience of the world is tending –
A wind is rising, and the rivers flow,'
Wolfe says.
We have a sense of this land
"more kind than home"
from what we see
here on earth every day.
The "conscience of the world" assures us it is there.
Nature itself flows towards it.
What better affirmation can any of us make,
if not that somewhere
at the end of all our struggle and effort,
there is a place we can envision,
and it resolves the injustices and contradictions
of our human ways,
and it forgives what went wrong
and it keeps what is good;
a place that is not really a place at all,
but a moral role in creation,
that heals divisions
and stands for some great benevolent truth
we know in our hearts is real.
Not that any of us this is easy to express.
Especially for us –
having solidly anchored ourselves
in the day to day imperatives of our faith,
the work of community and service and education –
we leave the question of a larger reality unsettled,
since we are not the ones to settle it.
So many of us have had to strip away layers of indoctrination
from experiences of religion earlier in life,
we welcome the expansive,
open sense of not knowing
and it makes us feel free.
Our own faith makes no demands on us
to seek or express our sense of God,
or what love may hold us in its embrace
as we go about our days.
Thomas Wolfe talks about it in different ways:
that land more kind than home,
which calls forth so many associations;
a place more large than earth,
which looks towards all creation;
and yet, despite the power of these images,
they describe little.
What they do instead is stir the heart to hope
and to faith that a good life is worth living;
that nothing is wasted,
and no one is lost,
in that land more kind than home,
more large than earth.
Recently a family called me to visit a dying man.
He was not a Unitarian Universalist.
His only connection with our faith
was that he visited a UU church in New York City with friends
from time to time.
When he learned that he was to die soon,
everyone, including him,
seemed to think that he needed a minister.
Not knowing any,
they remembered their visits to the church in New York,
and called me.
Such encounters put our own faith to the test.
We put such value on our relatedness,
the sharing of ourselves,
the intimacy of our community life.
We know each other.
Our ministry is an extension of that familiarity.
But I was invited to sit in a room with a stranger.
I knew a little about him.
I knew that he had cast off his Episcopalian upbringing.
There might be something he wanted to confess.
We talked about some of his unfinished life work,
and the status of his relationships.
And then we sat together for the longest time.
A few more halting attempts to open up possible areas of concern
led us to talk about what happens when we die.
We Unitarian Universalists don't talk about such things much,
and when we do,
we don't agree.
But I wasn't there to give him
a survey of UU attitudes about life after death,
and it occurred to me at that moment
how utterly useless such self-inventories are.
All I had to offer him were my own tentative thoughts,
the only ones I could speak with any authority,
not that they were based on anything
but my individual, rather primitive beliefs.
I said to him,
"Well, I've always thought –
ever since I was a young child,
that there is some part of us
that belongs to God.
And I think that part of us existed
before we were born
and goes on after we die.
And I imagine that when we die,
we don't go on consciously as the person we were in life –"
and when I said that, I cringed a little,
for this man had one day, at most,
left to be himself.
"I imagine that something does survive,
and that we follow it, or become it,
and it takes us home."
It's amazing what comes out of us
when we are confronted with the exigency
of a situation such as this.
More than anything,
I felt I needed to speak the truth as I understood it.
And I needed that truth to be something that would comfort,
not anger, or frighten,
a man who was about to lose
the only life he had.
'To lose the earth you know, for greater knowing,
To lose the life you have, for greater life,
To leave the friends you loved, for greater loving ...
Can any one of us be in the presence of death
and not reach for the greater knowing,
the greater life,
the greater loving
that some part of us insists is real
and will sustain us, come what may?
I can't.
I came home from my visit with the dying man.
The phone rang.
"He wants to see you again," his wife said.
"Come tomorrow."
But the next day he was gone.
Since then I've thought a lot about our faith
and what its message has to give to the world.
Much of what we have to say
speaks from our tradition of individualism,
which has taught us the values
of diversity and tolerance.
In these values we see freedom and growth.
As A. Powell Davies said, our faith
"begins with individual freedom of belief ."
Some people think God wears a blue hat –
to recall Christopher Buice's fable –
and some thinks she wears a red one.
Some think that God really doesn't exist at all.
In Buice's story, the people get so incensed over their differences
that they split down the middle
and build a wall to stay away from each other.
Not until God herself comes back one day
and sees what they have done
do they learn that God can wear a hat
that is blue and red,
if she wants to.
And they wake up to the truth
that these differences between us
do not matter at all.
What matters is enjoying each other
and tearing down the walls that keep us apart.
Our faith tradition has long preoccupied itself
with honoring difference.
And that is a large part of who we are,
learning what it means to be in community
with some who see red hats,
and others who see blue hats.
But we sometimes appear to have forgotten
that our Unitarian and Universalist faiths have also pointed
to something beyond difference,
to something beyond Unitarianism and Universalism even,
to something we cannot capture or define,
yet is our hope and our truth.
It is something that "goes out to the limitless,"
as Davies said,
the transcendent reality that is
"more large than earth,"
where walls come down,
"more kind than home,"
where God helps people enjoy life –
and each other.
Our hope and our truth are to be whole,
not divided;
to find the place of greater life,
and greater love,
and to make our home there,
together.
There the wind is rising and the rivers flow,
and the conscience of the world is tending.
There we know our soul's true self,
in the eternal flow of life,
where all are free
and we are one.
Photos by Tori Bell
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